Why Pursue AI?

Q: Why pursue this technology?

Silicon Valley A: Because we can.

Better A: Because it will help humanity

Technology development over millennia has led to a fantastic lifestyle for us. We can live healthier lives (although some choose not to), and those diseases that continue to strike us are targets have cures targeted by further technology development.

Technology also gives us more efficient means of destruction of lives and property in wars still pursued by people whose egos cannot be assuaged otherwise.

Technology also gives us consumer pleasures such as the ability to stream music that helps me focus to write, but it also gives us Facebook and its ilk where the pursuit of money turns us into the product and learns what enhances our emotional responses so that we continue to watch/read more of the same.

Two news items recently found their way into my inbox. 

The first is from News Items by John Ellis. Ellis provides great summaries of the daily news. This one about why choose to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI)

This summer, the Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, invited Rishabh Agarwal to join the company’s new A.I. lab, offering him millions of dollars in stock and salary. With the new lab, Mr. Zuckerberg said, he wanted to build “superintelligence,” a technology that could eclipse the powers of the human brain. But although Dr. Agarwal was already a Meta employee, he turned down the offer to join another company. Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move. As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry. “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.” 

Yesterday brought my Abundance newsletter featuring a conversation with Peter Diamandis and Reid Hoffman:

Reid Hoffman revealed a counterintuitive truth about AI’s impact on employment. Here are five reasons why the job apocalypse narrative gets it backwards...

1/ Yes, AI eliminates entry-level repetition, and that’s exactly the point. Current data shows entry-level job losses down 16% in AI-exposed fields. But this mirrors what Reid told us: “If human beings are trying to do a job by following a script that an AI can follow better, that will happen.”

The question is: why are we clinging to work that reduces humans to algorithmic execution?

2/ The real transformation is humans evolving beyond entry-level constraints. We don’t need to “upskill.” We need to evolve into doing work that actually matters. As I emphasized in our conversation:

“The career of the future is entrepreneurship. It is how you use these tools to create value in the world.”

Every person will become what Reid calls “entrepreneurially thinking,” deploying AI agents as cognitive amplifiers rather than competing against them for routine tasks.

3/ Every tech revolution creates exponentially more jobs than it destroys. Reid’s insight captures this perfectly: “I think if you look at the industrial revolution, the net effect is always more job creation in the long run.”

For example, take India, where initial 20-25% drops in entry-level software jobs are pushing engineers toward entrepreneurship: exactly where the real opportunity lies.

4/ AI amplifies human cognitive potential rather than replacing it. Reid described his productivity transformation: what used to take hours now takes 10-15 minutes. That’s human augmentation at scale.

As recent studies have shown, students learning with AI are progressing five to ten times faster than traditional classroom settings. What we’re seeing isn’t replacement… it’s the democratization of superhuman capability.

5/ Timeline thinking separates winners from victims. The challenge is the compressed timeline we’re experiencing. Job displacement is happening much faster than many people expected.

But smart thinkers operate in decades, not daily panic cycles. While others fear quarterly disruption, entrepreneurs are building the infrastructure that will employ millions in roles that don’t even exist today.

Bottom line: what we’re seeing is the last generation of humans constrained by entry-level work. The future belongs to those who understand AI as a creativity amplifier, not a job destroyer.

Check out my latest pots at The Manufacturing Connection. Download podcasts or watch them on YouTube.

Gary